I trust your assessment of the DNS techs. But what about [their] bosses?

the ones i've met in recent years seemed like reasonable people.

They ordered some pretty lumpy things be done with .com and .net. Given that track record, whats to stop them from ordering [the techs] from doing something equally lumpy.

root zone content is tied up in all kinds of red tape. the root server operators won't modify it in any way; we publish only what we get from iana. iana and verisign and the united states department of commerce all have to agree on changes to it. imagine a "mexican standoff" with three people and six guns. with the ietf/iab as referee and scorekeeper, and the rootops as an interested audience. ("entertain me!") i'll say it again. nothing that happens in dot-com or dot-net has any relevance at all to the root zone, or to the root server operators.